Storms

Today was supposed to be an off day: I was supposed to go for a long run, show the house to a potential renter, and go to the lake--no time to write.  But now it's storming outside, which puts a wrench in all those plans except for showing the house.  I might run in a little bit, too, but I need to let the storm pass over a little bit, so I thought I would write.

I had a fairly productive day yesterday writing and working through some genre theory.  A lot of what I read and took notes on deals with issues of ideology and critical genre studies.  I think this probably be a good line to follow because so much of the visual rhetoric deals with various ideological manifestations of images in the public sphere.  I'm thinking of Diana George and Diane Shoos' article on lynching and execution photos.  If I remember correctly, in that article they talk about the ways those images position viewers as witnesses and (I think more often) voyeurs, with all the implications of those terms.  That actually ties in to another concern of a lot of these genre pieces, which is identity, or the way genres designate certain subject positions for their users.  Because there seems to be a fair amount of overlap here, I'm tempted to start going more for the synthesis and less for the overturning model for this chapter.  After all, ultimately George and Shoos are comparing two related genres of photograph, no?  Even thought they aren't using that term, I think you can pretty easily make the argument that that's what they're doing.  And so my point (sorry about the odd switching between second and first person here) might be that although these various approaches to the visual resonate with genre theory, they can more productively be brought together by recourse to genre as an organizing principle.